Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the leader of the Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi have visited the refugees to hear about their ordeal and offered some reassurance.

There have been claims that local politicians and the police have not dealt with the situation effectively.

"It is the duty of the government to ensure the safety of life and property so that people are able to return to their homes," Mr Singh said.

Many of those displaced say they will never go home, a sentiment shared by one of the refugees, Tasleem Begum.

"We can beg and stay in shanties on the roadside, rather than going back," she said.

Government officials in about 147 villages, where Hindus and Muslims had peacefully co-existed for decades, say all the Muslims have left the villages.

There is also concern that the violence will escalate with the festival season approaching, according to the district magistrate of the affected Muzaffarnagar region, Kaushik Raj Sharma.

"Coming months are going to be very challenging times. There will be the season of all these festivals. There will be Dussehra, Eid, Diwali, then there will be Moharram," he said.

Political motivation?

About 800 troops were dispatched to the area on the weekend the clashes erupted, as armed gangs of Jats, a group practising Hinduism, stormed a mosque and a village with Muslim residents, the state's principal home secretary R.M. Srivastava said.

Authorities declared a high security alert after clashes between Muslims and Hindus in the state, which has witnessed some of the country's worst religious riots in recent decades.

The recent riots have triggered speculation that political parties are seeking to polarize the state along religious lines ahead of upcoming general elections due by next year.

The state's secular ruling Samajwadi Party has accused leaders of the Hindu nationalist Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) of fuelling tensions with inflammatory speeches.

A state BJP politician, Hukum Singh, rejected accusations that the party was behind the violence.

"The government has failed on all the fronts... they are now searching for a scapegoat," Mr Singh said.

Senior BJP leader Ravi Shankar Prasad accused the state government of failing to act in time to check the violence.

"The state government has failed miserably in maintaining communal harmony," Mr Prasad said.

The BJP is working to revive its fortunes before the elections by attacking the ruling Congress-led government over a string of corruption scandals.

The national government has warned that India is witnessing a rise in communal violence and that there could be more of such incidents in the run-up to polls.

It's a fundamental human yearning to be a part of something bigger than one's self, and maybe that's what drove my mate Ash to die, far from home, in a bloody foreign war against Islamic State, writes C August Elliott.